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Red Hat Software Businesses Linux Business Software Linux

WBEL4 Preview Ready For Testing 265

Posted by timothy from the amazing-margins-up-to-65-percent dept.
linuxbeta writes "A preview of WBEL4 (White Box Enterprise Linux) is currently available via BitTorrent. White Box nicely fills the niche between Fedora and RHEL. WBEL Sreenshots. WBEL FAQ. With this latest White Box Enterprise Linux release, is it time to walk away from RHEL?" Not if you want support from Red Hat, it's not.
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WBEL4 Preview Ready For Testing More

WBEL4 Preview Ready For Testing

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  • What about CentOS? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 04, 2005 @01:15AM (#12131050)
    CentOS screenshots shots.osdir.com [osdir.com]

  • White Box? Red Hat? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Bananatree3 ( 872975 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @01:16AM (#12131058)
    Hmmm... how about Purple Moose?

  • CentOS (Score:4, Informative)

    by barwin ( 588144 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @01:17AM (#12131062)
    CentOS [centos.org] also fills this niche, and I think has a stronger community base behind it. It's been a while since I've done a full comparison though.

    • Re:CentOS (Score:5, Interesting)

      by LnxAddct ( 679316 ) <sgk25@drexel.edu> on Monday April 04, 2005 @02:07AM (#12131257)
      RHEL have recommended CentOS in the mailing list if you need an enterpise system and you or your company can't afford $345 a year. I guess that says alot about it. Some red hat engineers have even helped the CentOS project out.
      Regards,
      Steve

      • Re:CentOS (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Total_Wimp ( 564548 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @04:23AM (#12131743)
        Not that I'm against variety or anything, but doesn't it make sense for these two projects to merge? Is there some need each fills that the other doesn't?

        I'm not trying to bash either one, I just don't understand why if they live next door, leave at the same time and work in the same office they might not want to ride-share?

        TW
        • > Not that I'm against variety or anything, but doesn't it make sense for these two projects to merge?

          Uhmm, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) isn't exactly a project that could merge with CentOS.

          If you mean WBEL and CentOS, CentOS is bigger so I guess it'd make sense for WBEL to merge into CentOS but I don't think its existence is any kind of hindrance to CentOS (or vice versa) so if they want to be separate projects, let them be.

      • Re:CentOS (Score:3, Insightful)

        by halleluja ( 715870 )
        RHEL have recommended CentOS in the mailing list if you need an enterpise system and you or your company can't afford $345 a year.

        Darn. What company can't afford 345 bucks a year?? I mean, a new computer is even more expensive.

        • How many enterprises have only one server? We're pushing something like eighty Linux servers here.

          (Mind you, I'm still pushing for RHEL4 on our next platform revision, but it's easy to imagine that if the company were more cash-strapped that a $27,600 savings would be quite attractive.)

      • Re:CentOS (Score:3, Insightful)

        by traabil ( 861418 )
        IANALE (I Am Not A Linux Expert), but how on earth could you possibly need an enterprise system if you cannot afford $345 a year?

        • Re:CentOS (Score:5, Interesting)

          by jallen02 ( 124384 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:57AM (#12132214) Homepage Journal
          Its not about needing an enterprise system. If you want to use RedHat's more stable product offerings then you have to pay. While Fedora Core is a nice operating system it is referred to as a "Test Bed" by RedHat. "Test Bed" operating system and "Production Environment" don't go toghether in my mind. With the end of RH 9 there isn't a freely available OS from RH anymore. You have to pay. So if you are familiar with and or like RedHat you have to compile from source if you don't want to pay. This is especially interesting when you have software that only runs on one of the commercial operating systems and you have been using RH for years as it was one of the supported OSes. $345 / year * 10 boxes. That is not an insignificant cost. Across 5 years that is ~$20,000.

          Jeremy
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • I completely agree with you that you want to run something like Whitebox or CentOS if one of your apps needs a RH variant to run at all. But the cost argument you are making is flawed and unfortunately all too common:

            $20,000 over a five year period != $20,000 now

            When appraising investment alternatives you _must_ discount future cash flow, otherwise you are making wrong decisions. So, the (discounted) present value of $20,000 over a five year period is in fact much less than $20,000.

            Having said that, if

        • Re:CentOS (Score:4, Informative)

          by darylb ( 10898 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @07:38AM (#12132361)
          I've fount CentOS quite useful for testing, especially with Oracle. The production and final QA machines run RHEL. Unit and integration testing all runs with CentOS. The goal is to duplicate the production system as much as possible early in the cycle. CentOS is great for this.

      • RHEL have recommended CentOS in the mailing list if you need an enterpise system and you or your company can't afford $345 a year. I guess that says alot about it.

        And if your company can't afford or won't pay $345 a year for an enterprise system, that says a lot about the company.

  • Differences between Whitebox, CentOS, Tao? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 04, 2005 @01:18AM (#12131070)
    I'm currently using CentOS 4.0, which works great.

    What distinguishes Whitebox and Tao from CentOS? As far as I've been able to tell, they're all just blatant imitators of RHEL, but CentOS appears to have the largest community (and therefore, the greatest prospect of actually being around in five years).

    So: why bother with Whitebox or Tao?
  • Did anyone else think of Star Trek II: The Wraith of Khan when they saw the font on the login screen that reads "White Box Enterprise Linux".

  • It is important to note... (Score:5, Informative)

    by LnxAddct ( 679316 ) <sgk25@drexel.edu> on Monday April 04, 2005 @01:20AM (#12131079)
    It is important to note that Red Hat eningeers have actually helped put White Box out. People here are going to yell and complain about how Red Hat made White Box remove any mention of Red Hat and they are probably also going to suggest that you dont need RHEL anymore. I'm just clarifying that Red Hat isn't out to crush White Box, but corporate customers really were confused. If you want or need support (as most companies and enterprises need) go with RHEL, if you don't need support then go with White Box, its pretty decent and some of the same engineers involved with RHEL have helped with White Box. Personally, Red Hat does a hell of alot for the community in everything from the kernel to the gui so $345 a year isn't bad if your company can afford it and you'll be supporting the community. The only place Red Hat has ever screwed up was due to a marketing mistake, so let's be nice...if that's the worst they ever do then we'll be pretty well off imho.
    Regards,
    Steve
    • Ugh... ignore the above post, it is accurate if you replace White Box with CentOS. It may still be accurate for White Box, but I only know for CentOS. It was my understanding that one project took over for the other (so White Box == CentOS or so I thought), but apparently they are still both up and running, go figure.
      Regards,
      Steve
    • Why is it people look down on a project as soon as they ask for money?
      • Cause they ask for it the wrong way. Red Hat should have made it a very attractive option to get support for their enterprise GNU/Linux offering, not a requirement.

      • Re:Mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)

        by LnxAddct ( 679316 ) <sgk25@drexel.edu> on Monday April 04, 2005 @02:00AM (#12131238)
        I think it is just the general slashdot mentality. Slashdot group think leads to alot of wierd assumptions. One being that money==bad, but money made linux mainstream and continues to foster more of it's development then any other means. Without distributions making money off of linux, it's development would slow down quite a bit. People don't realize all that companies like Red Hat do for the community, maybe if they grepd a few major projects they'd see. Anyway... I would never suggest that what slashdot's users think is actually how reality works and this applies to many things. One major area being with GUIs. Most notably, alot of slashdotters disagreed with Gnome's switch to the spatial model. The thing is, companies like Red Hat (probably Novell too) do HIG studies with actual users and implement what they find is needed or wanted. Developers don't realize that only about 5% of their needs overlap with regular users in GUIs. Everyone screams and shouts that they want linux to be mainstream and to have all this greatness, but then they scream and shout when money is involved and changes are made that benefit 95% of people rather then their 5% needs. Its just a wierd kind of paradox here, I've learned to live with it over the years.
        Regards,
        Steve
        • One major area being with GUIs. Most notably, alot of slashdotters disagreed with Gnome's switch to the spatial model.

          I think you'll find that, in terms of the groupthink (as hard to properly define as it is), what "slashdotters" don't like is actually having to learn to do things a different way. It wasn't so much that the spatial model didn't suit their needs, it was more the fact that it required them to learn a new way to structure their files, and interact with their system. To be fair, having that
      • I wouldn't say that people look down on redhat for asking for money, so much as they like having an alternative when the money isn't necessary.

        for example, i worked with a company who was looking to deploy their servers on a new platform. The initial development was done on FreeBSD, but we were looking at using Red Hat Enterprise Linux when the time finally came for full scale deployment. We had no problem with paying for the Red Hat Enterprise subscription on our production servers, but we wanted to be

  • Other flavors... CentOS & TaoLinux (Score:4, Informative)

    by Erik_ ( 183203 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @01:22AM (#12131086)
    There are also other flavors available...
    CentOS at http://www.centos.org/ [centos.org] and probably TaoLinux at http://www.taolinux.org/ [taolinux.org] will also follow suit with a new release.

    One interesting software release that takes advantage of North-American Linux Enterprise distribution, is Asterisk@home, which comes with a recent CentOS 3.4 build. Spin your own VoIP infrastrucutre from http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

  • What about kernel compatibility? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @01:26AM (#12131103) Homepage
    Binary driver vendors only distribute binary drivers for certain kernel versions of certain distros, mostly redhat suse and mandrake. The nVidia drivers are an example, but they can also recompile for vanilla kernels, but what about say a binary driver compiled for the stock 2.4 kernel that comes with redhat 9 shrike? Will it work seamlessly with WBEL?

    I'd imagine all kernels were recompiled, at least to remove the word 'redhat'. I know I could download RHES kernels from their installation floppies and use those... but is that required to run precompiled kernel modules?
    • No, it's not. As long as the kernel "uname" remains the same, the source isn't too wildly, and the .config is consistent, the actual name of the RPM package or the labeling information allows inter-operability.

      Trust me, I tried that stunt with a number of kernels years ago and it worked just fine.
      • You've obviously never installed the IBMTape driver then.

        This fucking bastard actually checked the sublevel of the redhat kernel.

        So basically, while I might be running:

        2.4.21 on RHAS 3.0

        IBM would check for the freaking sub-release number so I had to be running:
        2.4.21-27.0.2.ELsmp

        I couldn't run:
        2.4.21-9.ELsmp

        Oddly enough when we had no choice but to use a newer kernel version and IBM hadn't updated the tape driver, we were able to manually extract everything from the RPM (The goddamned RPM refused to i

    • Re:What about kernel compatibility? (Score:4, Informative)

      by barwin ( 588144 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @01:41AM (#12131165)
      Had that problem with one of the early CentOS kernels because they had renamed it. Now they keep the name exactly the same so any 3rd party drivers that rely on kernel versions are 100% compatible with CentOS. I can only assume WBEL is doing the same (or will when complaints come flooding in).
    • Kernel modules compiled for RHEL3 work on WBEL3 -- I've used WBEL at the office for test servers we didn't want to buy licenses for. (Presently, it's a moot point -- we're switching to SLES).
    • Any vendor that doesn't at least provide a compilable (and patchable) glue layer like nVidia's really deserves to be hurt.

  • "To Retain Enough Compatibility" - Not good enough (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hillct ( 230132 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @01:28AM (#12131117) Homepage Journal
    Their mission statement says it all. Centos retains complete compatibility. 'Enough Compabibility' means there will be a divergence between WhiteBox and RHEL while they hope "to support RHEL Erata releases" which is a complete contrediction. It's not good enough to be able to install RHEL erata fixes. It's nessecery to ensure that no other security or reliability problems are introduced by any divergence from the platform on which you depend for your security patches.

    While I believe variety in Linux distributions in itself is a positive contribution to the platform's overall growth and appeal, The distributions should be distinct enough to offer a meaningful value-add as compared to others already established in the market (free - as in beer - as the market is).

    Where Centos provides an unincumbered version of a supported (and thereby presumed superior) distribution, what is WhiteBox providing over either of these existing and established offerings?

    --CTH

  • Red Hat's response? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cimmer ( 809369 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @01:31AM (#12131126)
    I think this is pretty interesting. I have to admit my ignorance of the WBEL intiative before tonight, but I am now looking at all the Redhat Enterprise licenses I was about to go buy and am wondering if this isn't a better alternative.

    Most of the Enterprise licenses I've purchased have been acquired to avoid the upgrade dance. I know linux well enough to troubleshoot just about anything that comes up outside of obscure kernel and driver issues. In my two years using Redhat Enterprise, I've had to use their tech support once to resolve a hardware issue. I wonder how many other corporate IT depts are in a similiar situation and how this will ultimately affect Redhat revenue?
    • I would really consider CentOS [centos.org] if you prefer using operating systems that are maintained by a team of developers. WBEL seems to be maintained by mainly one individual who works for a US library and he has made it clear that he does not want to relinquish control of the project to others. At least with CentOS you know if one team member decides that they don't have enough time for the project then someone else can pick up the slack.
    • Most of the Enterprise licenses I've purchased have been acquired to avoid the upgrade dance.

      If you want to avoid the upgrade dance, you need to run on Debian. RHEL and its free clones have the same problem as all other RedHat distributions--when there's a new major release, you have to get a CD and physically go to the server and install the upgrade.

  • Support (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Cruithne ( 658153 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @01:36AM (#12131147)
    Not if you want support from Red Hat, it's not.

    That to me sums it up. The *only* reason i can think of to go with Red Hat is if you need the support. Other than that.. what are the benefits?
    • The benefits are that major proprietary ISVs such as Oracle, IBM, etc. make binary packages that are compatible with RHEL (and sometimes SLES). If you want to run an Oracle database, you'll need an RHEL-compatible distro.
    • Other than that.. what are the benefits?

      rhn is a big one. Being able to manage all of my system updates from one web page, knowing the exact status of the machines. They also have a higher level of RHN that allows even more management, like provisioning new installs.

      It's something I wish Microsoft would offer.

      • Satellite and Proxy (Score:3, Informative)

        by Miniluv ( 165290 )
        Beyond even vanilla RHN is the option for Satellite and Proxy servers, which can really be a boon for medium to large enterprise networks.
        We're doing a Satellite deployment here, which allows us to do one click provisioning of servers with known package profiles, including our own in house developed packages. It means that instead of relying on people passing command lines around within the organisation to do production upgrades (since each project within our engineering dept packages slightly differently),
    • By supporting Red Hat you support OSS in general. That's the benefit. Of course as others stated feel free to use centos et al if that fits your needs. I've never been a fan of forcing users to pay for linux, but paying for Red Hat isn't a total waste like many users like to think.

      Of course I suppose(and not directed at you) Morons saying Red Hat is the micro$oft of linux will never stop.

  • img-timeline (Score:5, Informative)

    by buddha42 ( 539539 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @01:40AM (#12131161)
    just fyi to anyone actually interested in a free RHEL rebuild, look into CentOS [centos.org]. When RHEL rebuilding first became a need, there were half a dozen different rebuild projects, of which Whitebox was the first/most-popular. However since then tao is all but dead, scientific is looking to merge with centos, and wbel went weeks and sometimes months between when redhat would release a security update and when he would get around to repackaging it. CentOS has emerged as "the" RHEL rebuild because it doesnt try to do its own thing at all, just rebuild RHEL, and because there is usually a less than 24 hour lag behind official RHEL packages.

    In fact, this very article announced whitebox finnaly got RHEL4 rebuilt, yet the CentOS team had it finished over a month ago, and I'll be putting my first live instance of it in production on monday.

    • How do the update times for security updates on RHEL and CentOS compare with Fedora and Debian stable/testing? I need to upgrade my desktop soon and timeliness of security updates along with ease of updating and length of support are probably going to be major factors in which distro I go with. Are Fedora security updates usually released before, after, or around the same time as RHEL? If they are released after RHEL, is the lag greater than CentOS?

      Thanks,
      - Tim

    • scientific is looking to merge with centos

      Stop lying. Thanks.

  • YALD (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 04, 2005 @01:44AM (#12131174)

    yet another linux distribution

    imagine if everyone collaborated on say 5 distributions, fixed the bugs, polished the GUI's instead of the thousands of distros that are more-or-less the same thing.
    MS would of been toast years ago

    all the time there are these clones of each other they just dilute the brand and waste valuable manpower, these distros dont add anything significant to the table, its as if Linux innovation has stalled and now people are just resorting to changing wallpaper and icons , sticking a different logo on it and call it YALD

    focus is a word that needs to be kept in mind, MS has been so successful because its a known quantity, i cant imagine the nightmares support/service companies will have in the future trying to support all these variations,
    thats why Red Hat/Suse are successful
    because they have a plan and are sticking to it, companies love consistancy and YALD is the complete opposite

    • companies love consistancy and YALD is the complete opposite

      Maybe you missed something in the article. WBEL is trying to be as much of a clone as is legaly possible to RHEL. They are aiming for consitancy. Your point is well taken, but I think you picked the wrong story to post it to.

      TW
    • I doubt very much work goes into maintaining those distros. Much more goes into developing the actual software that they all repackage.

  • Looks like WBEL is being discontinued... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sasha328 ( 203458 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @01:45AM (#12131177) Homepage
    I went to the WBEL [whiteboxlinux.com] website, got re-directed to Whiteboxlinux.net and this is what I saw:
    I've been actively involved in the CentOS community for the past several months. As most of you know I've become disinterested in WBEL. CentOS is nearly the same as WBEL with a few minor exceptions: updates occur in a timely fashion (usually 24 hours), the developers are accessible (even if via IRC), and there is an active community (again in IRC atm).
    CentOS has launched a new dedicated site at http://www.centos.org [centos.org]
    I have prepared a migration page for moving from wbel to CentOS. http://www.centos.org/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?faq id=19 [centos.org]

    I am confused now. Who's who?

    • Re:Looks like WBEL is being discontinued... (Score:5, Informative)

      by nonce tomar ( 873200 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @03:18AM (#12131515)
      A former user of Whitebox Linux and a semi infrequent poster to the user's list decided that whiteboxlinux.org didn't provide enough info and started this unrelated website. Subsequently he/they decided that Whitebox linux didn't meet his/their needs and put up that crappy statement. A shame as it confuses new users and spreads bogus information. I wish he/they would just take it down.

    • Re:Looks like WBEL is being discontinued... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Yonder Way ( 603108 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:33AM (#12132098)
      whiteboxlinux.net used to be a community site for the WBEL distribution. The lead maintainer of the WBEL project, exhibiting the traits of some of the greatest people in FOSS, was a complete dickhead to work with and furthermore refused almost all offers of help. Said dickhead blasted the whiteboxlinux.net site, wrote it off as domain hijacking, and the site maintainer was lured away to work on CentOS which had a much stronger community behind it and very approachable project leadership.

      WBEL was probably the first RHEL clone out with a 1.0 release but it's also a one man show. CentOS has a small army of people behind it so if one or two important people get hit by a bus, it will continue on without them.

  • Sloppy editing strikes again (Score:5, Funny)

    by goon america ( 536413 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @01:56AM (#12131222) Homepage Journal
    Can you spot the subtle misspelling in this statement?

    "Not if you want support from Red Hat, it's not."

    Answer:

    There is a iterative fragment missing from this statement. I've bolded it below.

    "Not if you want support from Red Hat until the whim strikes them to EOL your product, it's not."

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @02:06AM (#12131255)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • That's the whole purpose of Wine [winehq.org], to provide an open implementation of the entire Win32 API for *nix, so that unmodified Win32 binaries can run on *nix without emulation.

    • Re:I'm almost ready to dump XP (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That's actually not a bad idea -- only DirectX is unbelievably complicated and rebuilding something that from the ground up that could serve as a substitute for DirectX in any given game would be an incredible feat. DirectX is as complicated as it is jealously protected legally.

      However, there is an "Open X"! It's called OpenGL :)

      OpenGL started out as a library for educational-oriented 3D applications and has since been extended to be used in some of the most popular games, such as Unreal Tournament and
      • However, there is an "Open X"! It's called OpenGL :)

        This seems to be a very common misunderstanding on /.. DirectX != OpenGL. DirectX encompasses much, much more functionality than OpenGL does (sound and input, for example).

    • ..but it must be able to support my PC games. Why can't the community get togeather and create an open API like Microsofts Direct-X? Why not call the Linux version "Open-X" and start writing/porting games for this. Hell, if it becomes popular enough, then all W32 users have to do is download and install said "Open X".

      You have an itch, why don't you scratch it? Yes, that's the "default answer" and I know it may be unpopular among the "consumers", but if you want to create an Open-X, nobody's stopping you.

    • Why can't the community get togeather and create an open API like Microsofts Direct-X?

      You mean like OpenGL? (Ok, yes, I know, DirectX does more than just graphics ...)

      In any event, you don't usually play games on enterprise Linux distributions. So your post is rather out of place here.

      I would say Linux is that OS. But it really needs support from the entertainment gaming industry to push is public support to the masses.

      Since we're talking about enterprise Linux distibutions, what enterprise

    • Heh (Score:5, Insightful)

      by theantix ( 466036 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @02:57AM (#12131448) Journal
      You're almost ready to give up XP, but insist that software designed to run only on XP will run on Linux. Get over it -- if software makers wanted to support Linux there are many ways for them to do this -- and some of them do write crossplatform games that run just fine of Linux, but they are the minority. If you want to make the leap to Linux, you'll have to get it through your head that you're giving up many applications and hardware devices that are closed and designed to solely work with Windows.

      In certain popular cases people will create workarounds in WINE/Cedega/CrossoverOffice and enthusiasts have created drivers for some of even the most closed off and niche hardware devices -- but you cannot count on them to be easy to install or to work wonderfully. So really, you have to realize that not all software and hardware will work on Linux. What I don't get is that people are perfectly willing to accept that Windows-only hardware/software won't work on the Mac, but they can't accept that it won't work on Linux.

      When you buy a playstation2, you do so knowing you won't be able to play Paper Mario or other exclusive Nintendo titles. When you buy a iPod, you do so knowing you can only use iTMS for legal music purchases. And when you use Linux you must realize that certain software and hardware publishers are hostile to Linux and you can't just blindly use anything that expects Windows to be running. If you mistakenly think that one day it'll all be perfect and linux will be 100% software and hardware compatible... I'll just hope you aren't holding your breath until then.
    • Why can't the community get togeather and create an open API like Microsofts Direct-X?

      There already is one. It's called SDL (Simple Directmedia Layer).
    • Why do you think we don't have that?

      SDL - http://www.libsdl.org/index.php [libsdl.org]
      OpenAL - http://www.openal.org/ [openal.org]
      OpenGL - http://www.opengl.org/ [opengl.org]

      These are - specially SDL - very matured things and lot of games are coded in them.
    • I can't (well, in fact I can, but anyway) believe this guy got modded up the Interesting towertop for his ignorance of any graphics library and api besides MS's DX. Good job.

  • Software? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Masq666 ( 861213 )
    I did'nt find a list over what versions of KDE, GNOME, etc it includes. where do i find it? And have anyone here tested this distro, what are the pros and cons compared to Suse or Mandrake for example?

  • whitebox torrent... (Score:2, Informative)

    by torrents ( 827493 )
    mirror here: whitebox torrent [solidz.com]

    in case it goes down (little slow) hopefully tracker doesn't go with it...

  • WBEL vs Fedora vs CentOS (Score:3, Interesting)

    by diamondsw ( 685967 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @03:38AM (#12131569)
    Okay, someone please help me out here. Why would I choose WBEL/CentOS over Fedora Core? How do they relate, say, to Fedora Core 3, which has very similar specs (kernel version, Gnome version, etc).

    And if there's a good reason to choose them over Fedora, should I look at WBEL or CentOS? I'm very confused by the conflicting statements on this site [whiteboxlinux.org] and those on this site [whiteboxlinux.com]. To my reading, the second site is trying to make it sound like WBEL is dead, and the CentOS FAQ "confirms" it, but that doesn't jive at all with the "official" WBEL site.
    • To answer your queries:

      I don't know the difference between WBEL/CentOS, they are very much alike. CentOS seems to have a larger community behind it, perhaps.

      Redhat will EOL FC3 in about 9 months. After that you'll get some sort of community support for a while. The community will have to fix everything by hand. Since a new version of FC happens every 6 months or so and each version will require a new team to look after it I wouldn't assume this would go on for too long

      RH will EOL RHEL4 in about 5 years.
    • I suspect that when RHEL has serious server related problems, they are more quick to fix it. Another reason is the update schedule. Once a production server works, there is no reason to upgrade the OS except for bug, security, and performance fixes, which is what you mostly get with RHEL. With Fedora, you'll be forced into frequent feature upgrades that may introduce new problems. Generally, Fedora is better for desktops, and RHEL/WBEL/CentOS is better for servers.

      I had some weird packet loss problems when
  • Will Redhat persecute SBL now?
    Here's the scoop: Redhat hates CentOS because their salesmen keep telling them "we are getting caned in large data centres - they think we are expensive and are all grabbing CentOS instead." True conversation from the inside.
    Redhats response: be like Microsoft. Try to crush the competition by using lawyers. Redhat is threatening CentOS by saying that they cannot even mention 'Redhat' on the site. Not only is this a deliberately bad reading of trademark law (fair use, comparat
    • The only place they are getting creamed in the datacenter is places that DON'T run commercial products under WBEL/CentOS.

      I would love to see some corporate employee call up IBM or Oracle and say "I can't my database server working." "Are you running RHEL or Suse?" "Neither" "Call us back when you are."

      Sure you can lie and say that you're running RHEL2.1 but the first time you submit an egather report to IBM and it says you're running WBEL, they'll tell you to call back when you are.

      The only thing Redhat
  • There are some nice screenshots of Gnome in the article. The article's about Gnome, right? It's not? I see.

    Well at least Gnome works.
  • Even though you can't call someone to get a problem fixed, or ask questions, you still can put in a bugzilla.

    I have, and have had a better experience putting in a bugzilla rather than a RHEL ticket.

    There is no SLA with bugzilla, but the techs do want to get the problems solved.
  • Debian.

    Also known as:
    WTFNAB? - Who The Fuck Needs A Box?
  • Why not just run Solaris 10?

    Install it on as many systems as you want, you just have to register each one to get an entitlement (free - as in no monetary cost).

    Plus you get free security updates for the entire time it's supported...

    My company's moving to Solaris 10 because it runs everything we need (Apache 2, Oracle (soon to be PostGres), etc.)...
  • This is a question: The screenshots, though fuzzy from compression and scaling, show a nice-looking, minimalistic theme with a really clean font -- not, I'm pretty sure, the default GNOME font. Can anyone here identify this theme and font?

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